Juan Garcia Abrego

Juan Garcia Abrego (13 September 1944-) was a leader of the Gulf Cartel under his uncle Juan Nepomuceno Guerra. His arrest in 1996 led to Osiel Cardenas Guillen and his brothers taking over the cartel.

Biography
Juan Garcia Abrego was born on 13 September 1944 in Tamaulipas, Mexico, and he began smuggling marijuana from Mexico into the states of Texas, Louisiana, and Florida in the mid-1970s before adding cocaine to his exports in the early 1980s. He turned Mexican trafficking operatives from smugglers to suppliers, and he secured 50% of every shipment from Colombia as payment, and he guaranteed the shipment from Colombia to its destination each time. By the late 1980s and early 1990s, he was smuggling over 300 metric tons of cocaine into America every year. From 1989 to 1993, $53,000,000 was confiscated by the United States, a small fraction of the money that he tried to launder in America. His empire grew to be worth $15,000,000,000 at its height, and he used this money to bribe policemen and public officials back in Mexico, as well as hiring members of the Texas National Guard to carry his shipments to Houston and South Texas for him. On 14 January 1996, Garcia Abrego was arrested by the police after a rival cartel bribed them to do so; the government knew his whereabouts for a while, but the corruption in the government prevented them from capturing Garcia Abrego. He was sentenced to eleven live terms, serving them at the ADX Florence supermax prison in Colorado in the United States.